Thank you, lady, for reminding me what it was like To fall in love with Karen Fifty years ago. It was her eyes that did me in, Blue as the sapphire stones She bought along the Indian Ocean. Blue, . . . . Continue Reading »12Feb2010

Several of the founders, most notably Benjamin Rush, were fond of displaying the interdependence of liberty and virtue and the interdependence of virtue (at least in most people) and religion (or at . . . . Continue Reading »18Dec2009

Theres a joke going around among American ninth graders: Want to scare your parents? Tell them the teacher put up a map of the Western Hemisphere and called on you to point to Mexico, and you . . . . Continue Reading »17Dec2009

Yeast in dough. That is the image our American ancestors saw when they thought about planting the germs of beauty and nobility in their new culture. One only has to look at LEnfant’s . . . . Continue Reading »16Dec2009

By its liberty, the human person transcends the stars and all the world of nature, Jacques Maritain once wrote. No one has reflected more deeply on the phenomenology of the human person . . . . Continue Reading »3Dec2009

Three of the terms used most frequently in Catholic social thought”and now, more generally, in much secular discourse”are social justice, the common good, and personal (or individual) . . . . Continue Reading »2Dec2009

Three of the terms used most frequently in Catholic social thought”and now, more generally, in much secular discourse”are social justice, the common good, and personal (or individual) . . . . Continue Reading »1Dec2009

For the ten years beginning in 1982, I had the privilege of serving on the Board of Radio Free Europe (for East-Central Europe) and Radio Liberty (for the vast Soviet Union). President Reagan had . . . . Continue Reading »9Nov2009

This is the first essay in a week-long symposium on the pope’s recent encyclical. It is no secret that in U.S. Catholicism these last twenty or so years there has been an increasingly bitter . . . . Continue Reading »17Aug2009